On Thorns Stands the Rose
by Zaedah
Summary: One blushing shame, another white despair - Shakespeare and Walter explain everything.
1. Chapter 1

_Part one of three..._

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**On Thorns Stands the Rose**

_The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,  
One blushing shame, another white despair;  
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both,  
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;_

_William Shakespeare's Sonnet 99_

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It is not uncommon for men of note to become concerned with the propagation of their genes. Our forefathers were hardly immune to the specter of an heirless death and worked to ensure the furtherance of the genetic line and family name. And fortunes have been spent, make no mistake, in securing those same fortunes. Assuring a legacy and attesting to precious manhood by the breeding of sons. For me, those reasons were but a trivial grasp for immortality.

It was the work.

A child was needed to carry on the important strides my science had made. This was crucial, for outsiders could hardly be trusted with the building blocks of life itself. They'd make a mess of it, likely for the sake of profit and certainly vanity has been the knife our colleagues put to their own throats. I was not alone in this belief, my partner being something of a cheerleader for the cause of childbearing. Not his, naturally. For all of Belly's miracles, he could not reproduce. I'm told many women went into the proving of that hypothesis. No, it was laid upon me to create the future custodian of our research. Decades of secret knowledge would be the child's mantle. And for this, we preferred a male.

She was not informed.

That would have been counterproductive. That I was no longer opposed to contributing to the world population failed to raise her alarms, despite years of protesting the infringement on my time. Her biological clock, unscientific fable though it seems to men, was ticking loud enough for even myself to hear. A smart woman I married and one well equipped for the duty. Born to it, as it were. And unexpectedly, my son's arrival stirred something within me that I shall never be able to quantify. It went beyond chemical reactions or brain waves, something I consider instinctual. This being was mine; mine to educate and to elevate. The baby was my new source of pride, ascended above awards and progress. But those first impressionable years saw pride disintegrate into a shadow infinitely hollow.

Disappointment.

A terrible thing to admit, but though the boy had all the attributes of a curious tike, he was not promising. We'd crafted a male successfully, but had not engineered a prodigy. It's fair to say I loved the boy, enjoying his forays into bipedal locomotion and babbling efforts at speech. That he said 'mama' first was an unfortunate predictor. I have little interest in the sort of fate typically personified by a floating woman who extols the supposed virtues of letting something else control our path, but there are certain things that can be discerned by the unfolding of events. Predestination isn't just for religion.

Peter wasn't my heir.

My wife had experienced great difficulty in bringing the boy into the world and while Belly and I had developed methods for easing the process, she refused a second attempt. Peter was her universe and as such, sufficient to fill it. And in the time that eclipsed the most significant fight of our marriage, I came to agree. While he showed no early aptitude for the sciences, my son began finding interests beyond those consuming his peers. An interest in pennies was nursed at age four, recognizing dates and comparing them to printed guides increased his reading proficiency. The hobby would become a blanket in later times. The first time the boy with the light green eyes asked to accompany me to the lab I hugged him until he squirmed.

Pride was reborn.

He fell behind in school, a product of what the neanderthals of the education system labeled dyslexia. I disagreed, citing his comfort with numbers as a sign that simple practice would cure letter-dysfunction. But they wanted to medicate the child with primitive drugs, calm his propensity for rambunction as though crude chemicals could solve a stumbling mind. Quite the opposite, I insisted even as I freely indulged in private concoctions myself. In our lab I rewired his thinking using variant wavelengths. It was during these sessions that I truly bonded with the boy. I had plans to begin a new therapy, one that would conceivably expand Peter's mind so that I could yet mold him into the guardian of our work that Belly and I once envisioned. When he fainted one afternoon, I feared my first attempt had harmed him. My blame was misplaced.

Science has no heart.

It acts indiscriminately, a sword slashing carelessly through our ranks. I believed the armor of my intellect was enough to shield him from such a defeatable disease. Modern medicine had its inadequate answer but I was sure I possessed the only key to the question. Peter declined rapidly, though time is subject to the observer's interpretation. It forced us into the role of backseat passengers as the illness drove the healthy from him. Belly remained confident, working on a radical theory that sounded promising when it dropped from his smiling lips. The frown came all too soon. I held the boy's hand as tightly as his fragile bones permitted.

And I begged.


	2. Chapter 2

Part two of three...

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**On Thorns Stands the Rose**

_But, for his theft, in pride of all his growth  
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.  
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see,  
But sweet, or colour it had stol'n from thee._

_William Shakespeare's Sonnet 99_

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Burials are archaic.

It strikes me that even as we advance in knowledge some of our worst customs persist. We are not a species that excels at letting go. Putting a child into the impartial ground has no comparison in the human experience and the cards they give you are drivel. I recall my wife scanning each rhyme-and-meter statement as though she could drag understanding from cookie-cutter poetry. Having failed to reanimate him, I watched the dirt to which he'd return being sprinkled on the small coffin and every atom in my grieving body railed against the cruelty.

Faith was irreparably lost.

She would claim that my sanity suffered from that day forward, a victim of unrealistic goals. The world of unconventional science frightened her more as the weeks passed, but I couldn't be hindered with the task of explanation. The steps I was taking troubled even Belly, a staunch supporter of all things improbable. The concept wasn't foreign to him, having seen much the same as I under LSD's influence. Our many projects were left abandoned as I slaved over the impractical application of conjecture. That another reality existed was beyond question and reaching it became the air I breathed. Peter himself breathed somewhere else and no barrier would keep me from extracting him.

He didn't recognize me.

The place was unfamiliar, though I'd lived in its facsimile for years. Cars we never owned sat beside a sculpted lawn we'd never designed. While many of our experiments echoed the Twilight Zone, I now lived it because I found my doppelganger lying with a woman who seemed infinitely younger than the one I left behind. Their son, my son, slept in the room next door. He lived. And when I woke the boy with the muted green eyes, my lack of beard and thinner frame rendered me a stranger.

The scream was quickly quelled.

Spiriting away a seven year old was made rather more difficult by the fact that I'd neglected a sedative. For my next kidnapping, I shall remember this. Oh, he fussed and my lies were doubted as they paraded from my mouth clear to the other side. But something about the travel to our dimension stilled the protests. The boy had been unprepared for the taxation of such an unnatural excursion and his consciousness had simply shorted out. Back at my lab, I slid my living child into the chamber and for anxious days waited for the result.

I stole the mantle of God.

And like the child himself, I had no intention of returning it. Explaining the miracle had been as complex a lie as any uttered by the well-meaning. Heeding Belly's advice, the story was weaved with the thread of fact, a taut operation indeed. But when the boy was produced a week after burial and as healthy as ever, questions fell away. No one noted the darker shade of his eyes, the slightly thicker build. Any guilt assigned to me by my spouse was cast aside. Peter remembered little of his time in his original home, accepting the pretense of sickness-bred haziness without struggle. And his adoration for his mother only grew.

But I was suspect.

He never voiced discomfort with me, but my presence seemed to stifle something in him. Not afraid of me by any detectable measure, only the cautious regard of one trying to peer behind the mask and unable to pull back the layers. But my books fascinated the somber boy. And thus became apparent the overriding difference between my sons who, despite my internal efforts, still felt like separate entities. Individuals. The one I lost was slower to knowledge while in this one lived the evidence of a formidable mind. Brilliance in fact and in this I was well pleased. Here was my heir, our future. And though Belly maintained a strange aloofness in the face of my miracle, he could not deny our good fortune.

Fate and all her flowing skirts had been thwarted.

Belly's disinterest in the boy did not last. To my recollection, it was my partner who first broached the subject of experimentation on the child. Peter was, after all, our only specimen from another plane of existence. We owed it to the very science that allowed me to find him. And as Belly continued marching in one 'special child' after another in search of feasible candidates, I was scolded for refusing to add mine to the schedule. Selfish, I was called. Innate curiosity be damned, this was my son! But Belly reasoned that this Peter was not mine to begin with and it was inexcusable to suspend valuable research for the sake of emotional attachment. What happened that day, for want of a stronger word, I shall call a breakdown and the aftershocks rippled into a rift between us. A shame, really.

My first and last friend.

Ultimately my need to understand silenced the dying voice of my conscience and the experiments began. The boy was mechanically gifted, something I used as a catalyst for cooperation. Follow this gear, trace that wire and then watch what it does. We engaged in hypnosis whenever Peter turned timid, but I never put him at risk. So much was learned and yet nothing could be published. But it's true what they say; knowledge is its own reward.

The knowledge of Peter's origin would die with me.


	3. Chapter 3

Part three of three...

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**On Thorns Stands the Rose**

_How like a winter hath my absence been  
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!  
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!  
What old December's bareness everywhere!_

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William Shakespeare's Sonnet 97_

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Time enjoys forward progress more than most and it churned along with us in tow. My son grew and my wife smiled and I worked. So many veiled doors this victory over death had set ajar, each proposing an uncharted discovery. I had to learn it all, try everything. The more preposterous the hypothesis, the harder I strove to prove it, infecting Belly as well. But his quest veered into a craving of wealth, of public achievement. Such motives I cannot understand and when his trials with other people's children approached new levels of unethical treatment, I understood even less.

Hypocrisy is a scratchy suit.

I was reminded, in rather glacial tones, that I experimented on my own, stolen child and therefore I should offer no reservations over the use of strangers. Science was a search for better guinea pigs and the immediate payoff robbed me of my righteous thunder. Special children became our mutual playground and Peter was, as they say, off the hook. Oddly, once I halted our little games my son's grades seemed to suffer. Rebellion, my wife proclaimed in something close to prophecy. Yes, the boy was certainly asserting his independence and in the course of things began to deny his gift.

Laziness is a cancer.

I thought it was disappointment over the end of our lab time. No matter how much he feared our games, quality time with his father must have made it worth the discomfort. Or so I believed. I was too blind then, too focused on extending our knowledge to understand what Peter was doing. He was hiding his intelligence in a clear attempt to distance himself from me. Something in me came to disturb him because he seemed to view brilliance in quite the wrong context. Belly had departed by then, the lab my settlement in our suitably amiable divorce. As the burden of working alone claimed increasing amounts of my time, my family became something of an inconvenience. After all the laws of nature I'd smashed in order to recover my son, I allowed him to grow up in this dimension without the benefit of an attentive father.

But he was no less mine.

I believed that even as a sweet girl lay dead in the lab. Even as they led me away in cuffs. Even as I was declared insane. Peter was my find and I was his savior. Who knew what sort of life he was destined for in the other place? Who can deny the possibility of another premature death from illness or injury? He was safe here, of that I was convinced. The only side effect of his relocation had been tremendous nightmares, which I had helped him overcome. I pacified my worry with assurances that he'd be able to visit me often.

Except he didn't.

As a teenager, I remember pacing in foyers while my dates would slather veneer onto their faces. Eternity is a fine word for the waiting that women force us to endure. And a woman made me wait in that hellhole too. The only explanation for Peter's absence was that she was keeping him from me. It was unforgivable, this cruel repayment of all my efforts. And the passage of time no longer interested me. Easier to sink into the court-defined madness than suffer this separation with the full support of my faculties. Letters were sporadic, always in her careful hand and as vague as the confines of reality. He was fine, but no details were granted as to what that entailed. Until the letters ceased altogether and I was under no delusion as to why.

I knew they'd need me eventually.

In the remote place their drugs couldn't touch I retained the conviction that our work would be my salvation. Belly was still out there, accumulating millions by the manipulation of science and the man wasn't one to weather backfires well. They would come for me. And they'd need my son to do it. The waiting continued as one decade ended with the birth of another. A world proceeded, advanced without me but still I waited. Until a visitor came. And I knew what to ask.

I'd so very much like to see him.

And I did. Before me stood a man, thinned out with a beard gracing a face still rounded in a manner I knew well. My son. Not the first one or the replacement. No, by now he was one and the same. Mine. The eye check confirmed that he was still possessed of a shadowed, off-green shade. It no longer mattered from whence he came or from whom I stole him, which was essentially myself. We had so much to rebuild, but it was clear in those first moments that he did not share my pleasure in this meeting. A challenge yet again.

I'm never dad.

I noticed that in the first days as Peter reluctantly shelved his nomadic life to assist the work. Finally. The lab smelled like home, plus two decades of dust and I suppose my request for a cow set some kind of tone. I like that, surprising people. If one must wear the crazy label, one is obligated to enjoy the role. My projects were valuable once more and I was needed. But not by him. No, she'd undoubtedly filled his impressionable head with negativity. I soon learned to tread carefully, as scolding him for being like her triggered such protectiveness from him that my place was understood.

She came first, even in death.

Months passed and the boy softened a bit, still calling me by my first name but doing so with a marked decline of exasperation. The father in me was dismayed at how Peter had squandered his substantial education on frivolous ventures, but when he uses his vast knowledge for our cases, I am never so proud. He understands my theories, however much he disagrees with the logic. I'd always planned to work with my child and while this has come to pass, I find that I was wrong in my initial premise.

It's not the work.

Rather, it's the bonding. Making him grin with a well-placed moment of inappropriateness is worth the sigh that accompanies it. Teasing him about his fondness for a fetching blond, in my opinion, brings us closer to a proper father/son relationship. And though forgiveness has been slow in coming, I can now acknowledge that my wife had done an admirable job with him. A bit of a con artist perhaps and prone to more sarcasm than is healthy, but not lacking in heart. The lengths to which I'd gone to bring him here was nothing compared to what I'd do for him now. And ultimately she was right.

He is the universe and sufficient to fill it.


End file.
